Strengthening Your Mental Wellness

How do you build up resiliency to deal with stress, grief, and anxiety?

A few months after my son passed away, a friend reached out saying, “I notice you’ve been posting a lot about suicide awareness. Have you considered suicide prevention?”

Her comment caught me off guard. I hadn’t considered there might be a difference between awareness and prevention. Was preventing suicide even possible and how might one go about it besides simply making others more aware of the growing numbers?

She told me of a company called Amare whose mission was to create a holistic mental wellness platform comprised of products, programs, and people. Amare realized that there was not one magic pill to creating mental wellness but that it required a balanced approach, and they were committed to bringing this platform to the world.

I learned about the microbiome which are in our gut and play an important role in not only our physical health but also our mental wellbeing. When our microbiome is out of balance we can not only feel hungry and fatigued – physical symptoms – but we can also experience sadness and stress – emotional symptoms. I also learned that our gut produces 90% more than our brain of the key hormones related to our mental health.

Was there a way to build up my resiliency through adding specific products to my food as well as embracing a more balanced lifestyle? Could other parents benefit from this information in a way that might improve the wellbeing of their children? Teaching prevention vs. just awareness suddenly became a viable option.

Before taking any of the Amare products, I took their Mental Health Assessment. It took less than 5 minutes and gave me some great insight into my current state as well as suggested some simple things to help me improve my overall wellbeing. My initial score was a 6 on a scale of 1-10. This was in the normal range, but I certainly wanted to do better if it were possible.

I began taking the Fundamentals and Mood products every day. (I used some of their other products, but these were the ones I took most consistently.) After 3 months of using their products I took the Mental Health Assessment again. This time I scored a 9 on a scale of 1-10.

What was most surprising to me was that my son’s 6 month death anniversary was coming. Unlike the saying, “Time heals all wounds,” I was actually finding dealing with his death was becoming more difficult. Add to this some heightened family struggles, and I would have assumed that my score should have been closer to 4 or 5. Yet according to how I was showing up in life, my score was 9.

I realized that while life hadn’t gotten easier, my ability to cope with the stresses in my life had become more manageable. I would not have realized this if I had not taken the assessment a second time. Nothing miraculous had seemed to happen, yet I was somehow coping with life in a much better way.